


Theories or Verse

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Love, M/M, Poetry, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-29
Updated: 2014-11-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 10:12:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2688977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What are the differences between poets and scientists? They both have lovely fields of work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Theories or Verse

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to tumblr user davidtennantsgaycompanion for being nice enough to beta read this for me.

The day Dirk angrily uses the term “entropy” in reference to Jake English (thermodynamically, not philosophically), John says, “Yeah, asshole. And that’s why people don’t date scientists.” 

 

Bruises bloom in Dirk’s eyes, but John is not impressed. Jake is petal-tender; he kisses in quatrains and weeps over the curves of emotive lampshades. Jake bleeds when you bump him--but at least he bleeds.

“You know what science is?” Dirk shouts, as he’s walking away. “It’s the only solid promise of results!”

“It’s the opposite of love!” John yells back. 

Dirk might say his words were corrosive chemical compounds on his unprotected heart. 

His cousin Dave sums it up with, “Ooh, burrrn.” 

 

John has never fought with Dirk like this before, can’t walk in a straight line without him. He goes home after school and sits on the couch, missing him, and Jake holds him for twenty-three minutes before his arms get sore and he lets go.

The following Wednesday, Dirk slips a letter into one of his gym sneakers when he isn’t looking. John’s foot crunches it into the toe of his shoe by means of discovery. Dirk always sits in the science room during lunch period and plays with his Tesla coils (“Is that the euphemism nowadays?” John’s father mutters), so John has an audience for the verse. He reads aloud the part that goes: You are a perfectly symmetrical diatom / stippled with scintillations / delicately siliceous, a gift of geometria.

“That word, ‘stippled,’” says Dave wisely. “It rhymes with ‘nippled.’”

“What in the Sam-Hill does ‘geometria’ even mean?” Jane demands. “It’s all gobbledygook to me."

He’s kind of bad at poetry,” Roxy confesses. “He has no coltro- contral-fuck-control over what he’s saying.”

John studies diatoms that evening and is surprised to find out that they are not, in fact, female contraceptives. They are eukaryotes with various attributes, positives and negatives. John makes a list:

\+ They are a very powerful species of plankton.  
(- Powerful or not, they’re still goddamn plankton.)  
\- They are ecologically prevalent. (Common.)  
\- They’re at the bottom of the food chain.  
\- They are Triassic. (Elderly.)  
\+ They are Triassic. (Survivors.)  
\+ They are complex.  
\- They are microscopic. (Is small such a bad thing to be?)  
But: + They are beautiful.

What would John be, to Jake English? Surely nothing this intricate, nothing that merits research. You are the star in my season / and that season is ‘fall.’ (John sometimes senses their decline, after Jake has glanced sidelong at Dave.) You are The Scream by Edvard Munch, because that’s how John kisses, mouth open at an awkward angle, nothing to offer below the waist.

“You are going to hate me,” is what Jake eventually says over the phone, speaking softly, on Friday.

John is single the Saturday evening he puts on his mittens and walks to Maple Valley's only local pond. Dirk has collected water samples on slides; they are lined on the ground like crystal piano keys, silent without their strings or hammers. “How many diatoms do you think you have there?” John asks in greeting, clumsy, and Dirk doesn't pause like Jake does before he says, “I don’t know, but I’m naming the most perfect one after you.”

This is new and serious and John stares at a mouth that has been tracing formulae since the sixth grade. Dirk isn’t Ben Franklin; his tongue only knows picojoules and kilowatts by reputation. Virginity is the space between hypothesis and conclusion. Neither of them have ever tasted electricity. 

“Man, it’s cold out here,” John says.

Dirk has no jacket to offer him, but he swallows hard. “You could actually start a fire with ice,” he says, vying for conversation material.

John is still not impressed. He brushes his scarf aside to kiss him instead. “So what? You could start a fire with words.”

John doesn't know Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. He doesn't know about equal and opposite reactions, of the Jake-John carom to Jake-Dave/Dirk-John, or theoretical inertia, which tells the still world that it needs moving heroes. But the Law of Conservation of Energy is a principle of perpetual resource, of power that cannot be created or destroyed, and dating a scientist means having Dirk always there to explain: “See, there was never a time when I didn’t love you.”


End file.
